144 Hour Comic Challenge

As you've probably guessed, the 144 Hour Challenge is like the 24 Hour challenge, but is a little more sane -- 12 page in 12 hours, once a month for a year. The Cartoonist Conspiracy already holds an open jam time once a month at the Minnesota Center for Book Arts, so everyone can hang out and draw together, even if you're not doing the Challenge. Zander and I scheduled our first shift to correspond with the MCBA's coffee shop hours, which also lasts twelve hours. We showed up at 8 am and worked until noon, when we moved over to the jam table in the MCBA work room. Steve showed up to start his noon-midnight shift. Other cartoonists in attendance were David Steinlicht, Mike Toft, and Mark Simonson. When the monthly jam wrapped up, Zander, Steve, and I marched back to the coffee shop to wrap up Chapter One.

There is some debate about how much work you can do outside of the allotted 12 hours-- My take is that it differs from the 24 hour challenge in that you can put together some materials and come up with a plot and some characters (since it's a more involved story), but that all the drawing and writing should be done in the actual 12 hours.

I think Steve feels that writing can be done outside the meeting times, but that drawing must all take place during that day. That sounds good to me, but the reason I'm not doing that is because I'm lazy, and I don't want to work on this more than 12 hours a month.

I finished up late, but my 12 pages are done... hopefully I should get to posting them tonight.

While the idea is definitely to get 12 pages done in the 12 hours... any work anyone wants to do outside of the 12 hours, writing, plotting, drawing, whatever... is by all means fair and encouraged.

The point of the Gross Drawing project (unlike 24 hour comics day) is to produce good comics, not just to produce a quantity of whatever in an allotted amount of time. The 12 hours/12 pages is merely a device to make sure things progress at a defined pace. You can do 100 pages a month if you want to, whenever you want to work on them, but you gotta get your 12 pages done for sure to participate.

Note that since Kevin is also doing a 288 hour graphic novel this year separate from this, he will have done 432 pages this way by the end of the year. More pages than there are days in the year.

I can't imagine that anyone has done more 24 hour comics sessions than Kevin by this point... by the end of this year, I can't imagine anyone will even be close to him. Contact the Guinness book!

I should also note that we have four additional cartoonist joining us on this project next month... Shad Petosky, Tim Sievert, and Curtis Square Briggs of BTA & Puny Games, and the Staplegenius (http://www.comicspace.com/staplegenius/).

I hope you guys are giving the other BTA & Puny staffers plenty of hassle to join us as well! Maxeem, how can you resist?